The Mother

A fierce, shockingly intelligent piece of work from the gifted British writer Hanif Kureishi who wrote "My Beautiful Laundrette", (this is the best thing he's done since then). It's about intelligent people whose lives don't add up to much. They've squandered what they have been given and are largely empty vessels. The only character on screen who is alive is the mother of the title yet she feels dead inside until a rough handyman shows her some affection and awakens her to the joys of sex. He has his own motives but Kureishi treats him with a good deal of compassion. This is a film in which people and places feel familiar, where characters exist beyond the confines of the screen. In some respects it's a bit like "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" but it's an altogether tougher piece of work. The director, Roger Michell, allows scenes to build instinctively. And it is beautifully acted.

As the eponymous mother Anne Reid betrays her wasted life in every gesture. There is not a false note in her extraordinarily lived-in performance, and that very fine actor Daniel Craig displays shadings to his character than even Kureishi hasn't tapped into. If the film strikes a false note it is, perhaps, in the character of the talentless daughter, caught up in a messy affair with the man her mother seduces (or should that be the other way round) and even messier life, but she is so well played by Cathryn Bradshaw she hooks you in nevertheless. The film is also extremely beautiful to look at (DoP Alwin Kuchler) and must rank, unhesitatingly, as the best British film of the year.

It's hard to imagine a director capable of such godawful crap as 'Notting Hill' pulling off something as sensitive and as attractive as this, but well, here's the evidence and it's quite compelling. Several have alluded to TV drama, and yes, this does have a seventies Play for Today feel at times, but is always a cut above, mainly I think owing to some quite superlative acting from Anne Reid and to a fine script which shadow-boxes with cliché without ever getting one on the nose, except maybe right at the end. (I didn't like either the tracking shot of indifferent goodbyes through the hallway, nor the oh-what-a-beautiful-morning final scene: she deserved a more studied finale than that I think, after all that hard work. The slippers business was a bit OTT too, on reflection).

What I mean about avoiding cliché: well, I for one had a sinking expectation that the "mature" man May's daughter tries to set her up with would be cast in 2 dimensions as a repulsive old bore, so as to point the contrast more painfully with the attractive, virile young geezer he is unwittingly competing with. Instead, we get an unexpectedly subtle and sympathetic cameo of a lonely, clumsy, not entirely unlikeable and very human fellow, who nevertheless doesn't have much of a clue about entertaining a woman. It was around that point I started to sit up and pay more attention. Here was a script that let the actors breathe and do something interesting with fairly minor parts. Almost Mike Leigh in that respect (minus the contrived catharses that the latter inexplicably goes in for).

And of course I was, as everyone probably was, dumbfounded by what Anne Reid does with her character and with her body. She's /not/ "the repressed, dutiful housewife discovering herself for the first time", this is far too simplistic for the character we have. Again and again there are allusions to her having been a "bad housewife", not to mention that thing she does with trays, trying to look nurturing and comely and only succeeding in looking awkward. The daughter accuses her of having "sat in front of the TV all day" instead of, well, whatever her motherly duties might be presumed to have been: she has no answer. She never was a model wife and mother, at least not to herself - that's where a lot of the poignancy comes from, the sense of someone having wasted a life trying to fulfil a role she simply wasn't good at, ever.

What a moving film. I have a dear friend who is in her sixties and for the past 15 years has told me that people don't see her anymore, and she longs for companionship. Being in my late 40s I am beginning to see what she has been complaining about. You are no longer youthful, beautiful or touchable. When May says "...this lump of a body..." wow. How our bodies change and how we are told it is no longer beautiful. I love when she begins to change what she wears...the colorful scarf...no longer the frumpy wife.

It is a sad and wonderful picture at the same time. Sad in that May betrays her daughter's trust...beautiful in that she finds herself through the difficulty of the affair, and chooses to move on and finally have her own life. I love the character's daring to even initiate the love affair.

Mostly I love the movie because finally it is a picture that shows the intricate nature of relationships, be they familial or not. We see Paula's vulnerability, yet she will have what she wants at all costs...(when she tells her mum that she will have a baby for Darren whether he wants one or not after her mother asks if Darren even wants a child). The movie hits the mark on the how relationships can change, and yet reveals what has been there all along, dormant. May has stifled her own creativity to raise a family. A family that she didn't really want, but was "something you just did when she was young". I love the scene when Darren calls her an old tart, and she smiles and says "I was never called that before". It was truly a gem of a movie.

And Daniel Craig. Well, i just love him. I was pleasantly surprised. Not only is he pleasant on the eyes, he is a real talent. What a neat role. He is much more than any 007 that is for sure and I look forward to seeing him in more roles of this nature. The scene where he is pleasuring May and the look he gives her is sort of a look of wonder that he has such control over this woman, and also one of pleasure of being able to give this to her. He is actually enjoying giving her pleasure. A wonderful scene. The contrast is the love scene with Bruce. Bruce is totally absorbed with his own pleasure...two completely different men.

Alas...I wonder where is my Darren?

"The Mother" is a raw unpeeling of relationships between older parents and adult children in a very contemporary take on the British "kitchen sink drama".

Every character is baldly selfish to the point of startling brutality. Each one responds to attempted openings of lines of communication with "But what about me?"

The naturalism is palpably realistic, such that when Hanif Kureish's script crosses a line to go a bit over the top it's upsetting and jarring.

Director Roger Michell is particularly good at capturing the domestic mise en scene of sounds -- from simultaneous conversations to children's chatter -- and sights, such as lingering over meaningful visuals from a pair of old slippers to a casually bare torso.

Anne Reid gives the gutsiest older woman performance since Kathy Bates in "About Schmidt" and Helen Mirren in "Calendar Girls," but those were mostly played for laughs and didn't reveal the painful de-layering of inhibitions. Her character's continued low self-esteem to the point of accepting abuse is difficult to watch.

Except for a very atypical appearance in the first "Lara Croft," Daniel Craig has avoided depending on his magnetic hunkiness on screen. Here, as in "Sylvia," his manliness is a protean catalyst for the plot. In a complex triangle of relationships, his carpenter obliges the other characters' obsessions to project their fantasies and needs on to him.

While the grandmother finds some independence and self-respect, I'm not optimistic about the grandchildren in this dysfunctional family.

There's a very fine review by law prof on these pages and not much for me to add. Ann Reid puts in a superb performance as the middle-aged mum whose desires are re-awakened by her bullying husband's sudden death and Daniel Craig plays the Rough Trade tradesman with great gusto. There's also a wonderful cameo from Oliver Ford Davies as an elderly and inept suitor for Mum's hand. The story is told very clearly with sparkling photography – the cheerful visual atmosphere being rather at odds with the grim storyline.

My problem however with the film is that everyone in it is either completely repulsive (eg the son and daughter in law and the rough tradesman) or is behaving badly. Mum is a sympathetic character but she makes all the wrong choices, and behaves pretty selfishly, though we do get an inkling as to why. She wouldn't be the first Mum to kick over the traces after a long marriage to a dominant partner. But we wind up feeling sorry for her daughter rather than Mum because she gets done over, not because she is otherwise sympathetic.

The trouble with movies like this that, though they are true to life and emotionally convincing, they leave an unpleasant aftertaste. Are we all that selfish and immature? Well, families are dangerous places and the majority of murders are committed by a member of the victim's families, but relatively speaking murder is a rare crime. Competition between mother and daughter for the same (trashy) lover is probably pretty rare also. When it does happen, a film about it is probably justified. Still, at the end we wind up with no-one to like, which rather muffles the impact of the story.